Welcome to CominUpRoses!

Daughter Sally is working for GreenRose Enterprises, a rehab and design firm in Glen Ridge, NJ.  She wears a number of hats on the job; GreenRose's blog, CominUpRoses, is one of her tasks.  I'm so happy Sally is going to contribute her brains, creativity, good taste, and hard work in the cause of (re)creating lovely, comfortable old houses. Speaking strictly as an amateur, this is one of the best jobs in the world.  I "fixed up" a couple of old houses to make them more liveable for the family.  The tasks were impelled by necessity but wound up giving us pure delight.  I didn't do all of the work--only some.  There were carpenters and plumbers and furnace men and electricians and chimney sweeps around the house, too--in various combinations and at different times. I also made numerous trips to the DCRA (for the endless permits), the bank, Home Depot, Restoration Hardware, and other fleshpots.

If you click on the blog link above, you can read some of their first posts.  It's all very exciting!  Congratulations and good luck to Steve Moran and Ken Malian on their fine endeavor!  And congratulations for being smart enough to hire Sally!!

Happy Six Years of Blogging to Kalyn's Kitchen!!

I love Kalyn's Kitchen. Maybe it sounds a bit hokey, but whenever I check into this healthy food resource, I get a happy (warm, loving) feeling.  (And her recipes are great, too!)  On her 6th birthday blog, she posts "Six Life Lessons I'm Learning from Food Blogging." Here's the first one:

Life Lesson #1:  
Be Yourself, Because No One Else is Exactly Like You

It's clear that she is learning this, too, cuz there is no other food blog just like Kalyn's Kitchen. 

A few days ago, she posted (with lovely photo*--that's a big part of this blog's appeal) a recipe for Sriracha Deviled Eggs.  

Well!  I was so inspired I bought a whole dozen eggs with the intent of turning them into Sriracha deviled eggs and sharing them with my Spanish class when we met last Sunday afternoon.  The only thing missing was the Sriracha.  

You'd think that supermarkets and bodegas in WashingDC area would have Sriracha fully stocked. "Sriracha"?  Rooster Sauce! That's its other name, from the big white rooster silkscreened on the bottle.

Punch line:  Not a single bottle in any of my usual haunts.  There are plenty of look-alike bottles, though.  Are you thinking that hot sauce comes in wee little bottles?  Maybe some, but not Sriracha. 

Nice, big bottle with a smallish cap (to prevent accidentally pouring in a half cup or so if you lose your footing (well....).

I did find a lookalike that has more ingredients than the wee little bottle of happy long experience, and the ingredients are all relatively syllable-free: pepper, salt, tomato paste, horseradish, jalapeno (that's four syllables, but that's Spanish for Holy Toledo!).  Actually, this is the seafood sauce variant, cuz I love horseradish, and well....

Anyway....I'm gonna try the substitute until i get one of those coveted Sriracha bottles of my very own. I could always nick one from Merzi's, the wonderful new Indian restaurant in Penn Quarter where Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan has been known to pop in for carry out.  (Eating and working at her desk. I like that.)

Off to the kitchen to boil the eggs.

*Lovely photo to add appeal to this blog: Sam again, age 2+ or so, waiting for something to appear in his dish.  I thought to add a photo of the eggs boiling, but Sam's photo is much more fetching...

Wonderful Sunday Music!!!

As Darlene says, if you don't like this "kinder music," you don't like kinder.....

Words Fail Us

Spring!

Remember that old joke...??

This guy gets a phone call from a lawyer who is calling from a pay phone in Alaska.

The lawyer asks if his name is Joe Blow, and the guy says "yes, speaking."

Then the lawyer tells him he represents the estate of the guy's distant aunt, JoAnn Blow, and says his dear Aunt JoAnn Blow has left him $6 million dollars! 

Joe Blow is about to shout "Good old Aunt JoAnn!!" The telephone operator, however, cuts in:

"Please insert $18,000 in coins for another three minutes."

I'm here to tell you we're approaching that time fast!!

I was reading the giveaway tabloid on the metro this morning, and I noticed the weekend car ads.

Especially the one for a used 2008 VW Beetle for $16,993. 

"Oof!" I said to myself.  "WE PAID $15,500 FOR OUR FIRST HOUSE!!" (with two acres!!)

Then I remembered that our VERY OWN FIRST BRAND NEW CAR was a 1962 VW Beetle, and it cost $1,400!!

THEN I remembered going into my favorite bike shop recently and seeing a brand new BICYCLE that cost $1800!!! 


Gotta bounce....gotta meet a friend.  I'm walking a LOT these days.  It's very healthy, I hear.

INCORPORATE YOUR UTERUS! MATURE LANDSCAPING TELLS US HOW.

Thanks to Mature Landscaping for this article. It's been a bad day at black rock for us women, wot with the #*!@!! Republicans in Congress and their totally wrong-headed approach to just about everything, but especially to WOMEN and their unique health and life concerns. DC Rep Eleanor Holmes Norton said DC should tell Congress to go straight to hell. Not just DC, Rep Norton....That's something we all should do. Thanks to Nance, the driving, writing force behind Mature Landscaping for her thoughtful, exhaustive, and entertaining report.

Fast walkers!!

Claude Covo, who posts her fabulous pictures at Photoblogging in Paris, is achieving impressive speed in her daily walks. Her latest: 3.1 miles in 56 minutes!! Way to go!

My only previous exposure to rapid striding is this:

Salads!

It's UK Mothers Day, this Sunday, April 3, 2011!! (And a very Happy Mothers Day to Peggy, who is off to Malta momentarily with her local dive club!!)

Anyway, not that there's anything maternal about Jamie Oliver, but feeding our young is one of our necessary tasks, and despite the "maternal" appellation, it's no longer just women who do that. Nobody ever taught me how to cook. My mother was an excellent cook, so I just lined up at the table with the rest, then I entered the convent, where they had a wonderful cook from the same town as Lawrence Welk. When I leapt over the wall and eventually got engaged, I had to pick cooking up fast from various masters as I went along.

In the meantime, I'm wondering how I can get a haircut like Jamie Oliver's? Maybe with a hand-held blender??

Here we go again!!

It's TAX TIME in the home of XE, and she is once again AGHAST at how much Uncle Sam wants HER to pay (15%!!!) out of her miserable pittance of an income. And how STRICT and STERN the adminitions are if she doesn't cough up properly and ON TIME! Her beloved tax accountant warns: "Penalties and INTEREST," etc.

Interest. That's a hot topic. XE added up all the interest her various savings accounts earned over the past year, and the sum was in the LOW TWO FIGURES!!! XE is definitely not in the category of, say, General Electric, taxwise.

XE was raised in North Dakota, which was one of TWO states (out of 50, let me remind you) that wound up this year IN THE BLACK!!! And do you know why? I don't know about the other state, but ND has a STATE BANK, which is dedicated to helping North Dakotans grow their businesses and educate their children and harvest their crops and all of those other SOCIALIST ideas wherein the people get rich but the bank executives don't--any more than the people, that is.

The State Bank of ND was a hot topic about three weeks ago, but since then, ZIP! Any time any news reporter suggests that a banker might be happy not to be stinking rich, the MS media shut down. So there has not been much in the news these recent days about the SUCCESS of the STATE BANK of North Dakota.

I noticed today, also, when riding the BUS, as befits my position as a humble member of the penniless proletariat, that while there is a very PROMINENT street in DC named after South Dakota (South Dakota Avenue, which I pass TWICE A DAY and which goes on for BLOCKS AND BLOCKS), there is only a simple three-block thoroughfare in our nation's capitol named after NORTH DAKOTA.

Please join me in eating our hearts out......